Against Timocrates

You, then, abolish the corporal penalty by remitting imprisonment. For whom? For thieves and temple-robbers, for parricides, murderers, shirkers, and deserters. All such men you protect by your law. And yet does not a man who, under a free constitution, legislates, not to protect the temples, not to protect the people, but to protect such people as I have named, deserve to suffer the extreme penalty?

—Certainly he cannot deny that such people ought to be, and that the laws make them, liable to the heaviest punishments. Neither can he deny that the men for whose protection he has invented his law are thieves and temple-robbers; for the have robbed the temples of the ten per cent due to Athena and of the two per cent due to the other gods; they keep the money in their own pockets instead of making restitution, and they have stolen the public share, which belonged to you. Their sacrilege differs from other forms of sacrilege to this extent,—that they never even paid the money into the Acropolis as they ought.